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Saturday, September 28, 2013

`A Glory Lights an Earnest End'

“Old,
much alone, and seemingly self-sufficient, Melville could still be thawed,
though when a topic set him off he might fall into harangue rather than genial
conversation.”

Herman
Melville’s final years have been thoroughly mythologized by fellow writers seeking
to heighten their sense of romanticized neglect. So goes the familiar lament:
Artists are misunderstood and unappreciated. When will the boorish public recognize
our brilliance? In June 1851, as he labors to finish Moby-Dick, Melville writes to Hawthorne with his customary tone of
mingled braggadocio and self-pity:

“Dollars
damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the
door ajar. My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me, -- I shall at last be worn out
and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant
attrition of the wood, that is, the nutmeg. What I feel most moved to write,
that is banned, -- it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I
cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.”

No,
just most of them, but the others are glories of American literature and the
world’s. That Melville was a difficult character, perhaps a depressive, is
obvious. So too that he wrote great books and bad ones. No sane man writes with
the expectation of fame, wealth and
universal love. Art is not a democracy and its values are not egalitarian.
Critical justice is rare and good intentions count for nothing. Bad writers
thrive, good ones wither.More rarely,
good ones thrive and bad ones wither. It has nothing to do with fairness. The
late Frederick Busch’s novel The Night
Inspector (1999) includes Melville as a character in his role as customs
inspector for the City of New York. That’s the job he secured in 1866, the year
he published his poetry collection Battle
Pieces and Aspects of the War, which surely ranks among his masterpieces. Busch also writes about the author of Moby-Dick in “Melville’s Mail” (A Dangerous Profession: ABook About the Writing Life, 1998). In
another essay in that collection, “The Floating Christmas Tree,” he might be
writing with Melville in mind:

“Writing,
then, is a test of character; the ones who pass are merely doing what their
trade requires, while the ones who fail are doing what comes, alas, quite
naturally.”

I’m
traveling today to Fredericksburg, Va., to spend a week caring for ailing
in-laws. Most days I should get to tramp around the battlefield, keeping in mind
Melville’s “Inscription for the Slain [Dead] at Fredericksburgh”:

“A
glory lights an earnest end;

In jubilee the patriot ghosts ascend.

Transfigured at the rapturous height

Of their passionate feat of arms,

Death to the brave’s a starry night, —

Strown their vale of death with palms.”

Cynthia Wachtell reminds us that Melville waffled on the wording of this poem, eliding “dreadful”
as the modifier for “glory,” among other changes. Either version of the first
line seems a prescient comment on Melville’s subsequent quarter-century of life
as a writer. The passage quoted at the top comes from near the end of Hershel
Parker’s Herman Melville: A Biography
Vol. 2, 1851-1891 (2002). As the epigraph to his final chapter, “In and Out
of the House of the Tragic Poet,” Parker quotes the Oct. 10, 1891, issue of Harper’s Weekly:

“The
name of Herman Melville will not suggest any note of interest to many readers,
but it none the less recalls the career of a man of brilliant genius, who
practically retired from the pursuit of letters a quarter of a century since, in
the prime of his powers.”